


The Light at the End of the Road

by painted_pain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/painted_pain/pseuds/painted_pain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was white light – pure, brilliant light, pouring through the cracks, through every ragged cut in his body, in his soul and it was glorious, it was ecstasy and it burned. [5x16]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Light at the End of the Road

Dean paused by the door, his hand hanging over the bin, the amulet swaying to the beat of lost time and he let it drop, allowed it to slip from his nerveless, unyielding hands. The metallic thud it made as it hit the bottom reverberated around the room, echoing through his skull, flowing down to his aching heart and lungs, all the way into his broken soul.   
  
Dean walked out the door and left Sam behind, he didn’t turn to see the betrayal etched across his face; he knew the look far too well, had seen it so many times before. Dean didn’t turn around because he knew that look was ingrained on his face as well, he felt weighed down by it, felt the lines of hopelessness carved in around his eyes, his loss of faith dragging at the corners of his lips. He walked to the car, his bleeding soul leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.   
  
He stopped and waited by the trunk of the Impala, but Sam wasn’t coming, wasn’t walking behind him. There was no one behind him, no one at his back.   
  
The morning sun stared down, bleaching all colour from the motel parking lot and Dean couldn’t understand how it was still burning, how the Earth still moved, still turned. God didn’t care. Sam didn’t –    
  
He dropped the duffel bag, the dull sound as it hit the ground nothing like the metallic clang of moments before but Dean felt it all over again, a constant loop in his head.    
  
He stared at the sun and welcomed the blinding light, welcomed the dark spots when he looked away. The colours swam back into focus and they made Dean feel nauseous, like there was too much; he just wanted the dark. As he gazed around blinking, he caught sight of a flash of beige over the hood of the Impala, flapping against the bit of green grass beside the motel parking lot.    
  
Cas was lying on the ground, like he had tried to fly away but had given up and had just laid down where he’d landed. His limbs were hewn from lines of desperation and despair. Cas turned his head and caught his eyes and Dean would have caught his breath at the listless, bleak and broken look in the angel’s eyes if his own eyes didn’t hold the same thing.    
  
Dean knew what was coming next, he knew that he should fight but deep down, he also knew that it was always going to lead to this moment. So he didn’t apologise, he didn’t try to explain, there was nothing more he could say. He was going to follow through on the one thing that he swore he would never do and there was no way to fix that, to heal all those open wounds. He was tired, he was running on empty and he was done.   
  
So he just looked at Cas. Green met blue and the angel nodded. He looked away and Dean knew that Cas would never look back. They were both just too drained.    
  
Dean did the only thing that was left. The only thing he had left to give. His consent. But he still spat out the words.   
  
“I’m here, you sons of bitches. Use me as an angel condom and wear me to the freaking prom, already.”   
  
He didn’t shout, he didn’t need to. They would hear him. He just needed Sam not to hear. Dean waited but nothing happened. It felt like the universe was holding its breath, waiting. It was so silent, so unmoving. Nothing stirred. The sun became so bright it began it burn Dean’s retinas; he was being watched. He could feel it, feel the slow blink of expectation, could taste someone else’s triumph in the air. He ground his teeth. They wanted him to say it.   
  
“Fine. If that’s what you want, fine. I’m giving you my consent. I’m saying yes.”    
  
Suddenly, a wind picked up and began to whip Dean’s jacket, kicking up scattered leaves and swirling them around him. Dean took one more look at Cas and saw he had folded in on himself, had turned away from Dean. He was shaking.    
  
He heard someone calling his name, but it was too late.    
  
There was white light – pure, brilliant light, pouring through the cracks, through every ragged cut in his body, in his soul and it was glorious, it was ecstasy and it burned, his skin aflame with sensual, thrumming power. It was the most beatific painful pleasure Dean had experienced but it was empty of emotion. It was just neurons firing off in his brain. This is what an angel of the Lord was. It was cold, calculated and unfeeling, completely disconnected.    
  
Dean could no longer open his eyes, he could no longer move his fingers, could no longer feel and could ... no ... long –    
  
Sa –   
  
  
* * *    
  
  
Sam called Castiel’s name, except it wasn’t his name. It was a human name, an insipid, snivelling, human name, something an angel should not have. God does not care about humans; they were small, so small. God didn’t concern himself with the Apocalypse, why should he? After everything he has done for them, nothing good has come of it.   
  
All this flashed in his mind before he unfolded his wings and disappeared.    
  
Yet his true name, his angel name, Castiel; that was given to him by God. A God who doesn’t care if this world burns, He was not going to interfere. God did not care about him.    
  
Castiel had once thought his name was important, had meant something, a gift from a God, an indication of the will of God. His name gave him purpose. Now what was his name? Nothing but an empty promise, an empty ideal. There was no such thing as God’s will because God didn't care.    
  
Castiel stumbled to the ground outside the motel and fell to his knees. His name no longer mattered because to have an angel’s name meant to have faith. He had been stripped of it; it had been flayed from the flesh, from the soul. He was no angel, not in thought, not in mind, not in heart, not in soul; whatever was left of it.    
  
Slowly, so slowly, like the sands of time trickling through an hourglass, he fell to the ground, unfurling his wings as he fell. He wondered if there was something symbolic in that. Did it matter even if there was?    
  
He lay, spread out on the ground, his wings fanned out around him and tried to not think, to just let the wind ruffle the feathers, to not care, to become the stoic, unfeeling angel he once was.    
  
But he could never be what he once was. He didn’t have a name anymore. No name, no faith. God wasn’t dead but he wouldn’t help, would never help. He wondered what was worse.    
  
Was it blasphemous to wish God was dead? He knew it was.    
  
He shivered.    
  
A dull thud alerted him to someone else’s presence. Either Sam or Dean. Either way, there was nothing he could offer them. He had no more solutions, no more ways to save the world, to save them. He had nothing left to give.    
  
A slight breeze caught the edge of his trench coat, his ridiculous, trivial trench coat, and it flapped in the wind. He turned his head and caught the gaze of Dean. He saw the same pain in his eyes that he knew were in his, the hopelessness, the deadened blankness. Dean’s shoulders carried the world, carried all the responsibility, all the faithlessness on the Earth.    
  
He knew what was coming next, he knew that Dean should fight but deep down, he also knew that it was always going to lead to this moment, it had always been inevitable. He accepted Dean’s decision and he nodded. The world was going to burn, people were going to die. Good. Maybe God would –    
  
He looked away and knew he would never look back.    
  
He ignored Dean’s words, the last plea of a desperate man. Once upon a time, Dean’s turn of phrasing would have created a small well of amusement, now the words just tasted bitter.    
  
When the bright, holy light of Michael began to fill the morning with glory, he rolled onto his side, facing away from his brother in shame. He curled his wings around himself and as Michael’s Grace flowed across his mind, washed through his starving soul, he began to weep.    
  
He was still weeping when the door opened and Sam screamed out, calling Dean’s name, the sound ripping out of his chest like it was his dying breath. Sam screamed and screamed and still he wept. He wept when the sound of flapping wings echoed through the air, his own wings itching to follow, but soon his cries were echoed by another’s.    
  
He wept when the sounds the Impala filled the morning air and he was left alone.    
  
  
* * *    
  
  
Sam watched as Dean dropped the amulet into the bin. The metallic sound as it hit the base ricocheted around the room like a gunshot. Sam watched and realised how much he had hurt his brother, how broken he was, how alone he felt. Letting the amulet go was a manifestation of everything that had ever happened between them.    
  
There was so much Sam wanted to say but he could only stand in disbelief, feeling betrayed by the one person that had always meant the most to him. Did Dean not realise how much he had done for him? How much he loved him?    
  
He had to fix this, he had to do something.    
  
He walked over to the bin on numb legs and picked up this piece of tiny metal on a string that held so much power, so much emotion, so much history. It could never be worthless, could never be anything less than what it was. Sam gripped the amulet in his hands. He was going to fix this.    
  
As he held the amulet, all the happy memories that Dean hadn’t seen flooded his mind. They whirled behind his eyes with an alarming speed; flashes of bright smiles, barks of laughter, shining green eyes, shared moments of happiness and joy, wrestles on cabin floors, laughing so hard he cried, those wonderful birthdays that Dean managed to bring him cake with candles and his name on it, random days as a child when Dean brought him to the playground, every time Dean came back alive, and all those moments he could count on one hand when Dean gathered him up in his arms in a fierce hug, the tightest circle in the world, the one place where he would always be protected, to within an inch of his life.    
  
Zachariah was a bastard. Somehow he had manipulated Sam’s Heaven to show what would hurt Dean the worst, he knew it. Why? Why would that dick of an angel do it?    
  
Sam leaped up from his crouched position by the door, a horrible thought crawling up his up spine. No, Dean would never –. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t!    
  
He reached towards the door, glimpsing the bright world outside, the Impala glinting in the over-bright sunlight, his heart hammering in his chest, fear gripping it in a crushing vice. A heavy silence covered the morning and deadened everything. With a shaking hand, he pulled open the door and stepped outside, blinking in the glaring light, just in time to hear the one sentence Sam never wanted to hear come out of Dean’s mouth.    
  
The words fell like stones from his brother’s lips, cutting through the air, hitting Sam unexpectedly, without any warning.   
  
“Dean, NO!”    
  
Dean didn’t even turn, didn’t acknowledge him.    
  
And then there was light, white and pure; angelic light, brilliant and glorious. It hurt, burned his eyes and Sam fell to the ground, clutching his ears as Michael’s voice pierced through him. Pain lanced his brain, making him muddled and confused, everything became hazy and anguished. Blood, warm and wet, dripped from his ears.    
  
Then, just as suddenly as they arrived they disappeared, the sound and light fading out of existence. The first thing Sam heard, through the ringing, before he had blinked away the blind spots, was the sound of weeping.    
  
Sam looked up and saw Dean – no, not Dean, just Michael wearing Dean as a meatsuit – staring down at him, a familiar smirk dancing on his lips, except, it wasn’t Dean, and his eyes were blank and empty, unfamiliar and unfriendly.    
  
“Dean,” Sam whimpered. A litany of ‘No’ chanted through his head.    
  
Not-Dean laughed, Michael laughed and sneered and then just left. Sam was alone. Dean was gone and Cas – Cas was to his left, weeping as if his heart had been ripped out.    
  
“No.”    
  
Sam slowly rose to his feet, despair and anger and loneliness and heartbreak and another betrayal rolling through him. His whole body shook and he clenched his fists. He screamed.    
  
“DEAN!”    
  
The sound pulled itself from his lungs, erupting in a strangled sobbing shout that scrubbed his throat raw. He screamed and screamed as if it was the last thing he would ever do. The sounds ripped themselves from his heart and he felt like his whole world had shattered.    
  
Eventually, he screamed himself raw and collapsed to the ground, completely drained. He felt his fisted palm prick in pain and opened it to discover he had gripped the amulet so tight he had cut the skin. He stared at the amulet and with a final wordless yell, flung it as far away from him as possible. He watched as it glinted in the empty sunlight and then disappeared.    
  
Sam realised Cas had yet to stop his weeping.


End file.
